Chapter 7-187: Such a Good Bad Time You’re Having (1/2)
Well, there was nothing for it but to prepare for a really good time, and lots of intense and excitable visitors coming right to us.
Or, as The Mick put it, we were going to fight them with money. Claymore mines accentuated with Glyphs of Warding, Warding-type spells ready to go off, Stone Shaping the terrain to channel the creatures this way and that (although doubtless there would be many who ignored the terrain), and so forth and so on. Since I could excavate a whole lot of stone remarkably quickly with a Sudden Widened Dawnstopped Stone Shape V, everyone had their own pet ideas on what they wanted to see.
But first, I slowly and grandly flew up above the burning fiery Dome of power these alien wankers had made about themselves, and which they arrogantly believed could hold against our attacks. I wanted to tell them that Sama and Briggs could hack their way through it, but leaving all of them to be killed by the duo might have been asking a bit much.
I could also disrupt sections of it with a touch of Argent Savancy, but no reason to tell them that until it was entertaining on my end.
No, I flew up right to the apex of the Dome, and sat down in midair above it. Then I removed a mental barrier I’d put in place, and I reached out for the power of the Land.
Blargh! I had to fight the urge to vomit. The Dome below felt like I was sitting above a massive cancerous postule ready to pop and cover me in ugh, the revolting touch of the Qi shaking me with its viscosity. I could feel the ley line under the volcano being tapped, its power drawn up, ripped apart, and wrenched into a new and alien configuration that was currently being tapped by this Dome, while the creatures inside it drew the Qi in to accelerate their Cultivation.
I did a Very Bad Thing, but it was for all the Very Best Reasons.
I reached out, and with a superbly calloused attitude, as if the power of the Land belonged to me and only to me, tore it away for my own use, shredding and severing it from the rest of nature as I did so with the Cursed force of my will.
Two things happened. One, dozens of Druidic spells lit up on my inner Wall of Spells, finally able to be Cast as the power flowed into me. Sure, it was Fire-centered power, but I had the Blighter Parched Domain, so that wasn’t an issue. To make it clearer, the entire Blighter spell list was open to me to draw from, up through Valence III... and I had the Elemental Theurgy to promptly hybridize and merge all of them with arcane energy.
Pure Theurgy, ONE spell list. I just couldn’t do it with IV’s and V’s yet.
I couldn’t Write them all at one time, I had to Slot them to do that. But I should be able to recycle the energy here from my Wisdom bonus Slots and Domain Slots, and do so over and over, as long as I didn’t Cast from them.
That would all clearly sidestep my need to Blight to access the natural magic of the land. The back of my head was gleefully conflating spells and types on the list, taking the best of both and leveraging it for more Theurgic power.
Some magic was done better in one type of energy than another, or a Class had more insight into the function of the magic than another. Theurges could take the best of either... and sometimes, put them together!
Oh, and yes, the entire area for hundreds of feet around me was severed from the magic of the Land, and that meant the ley line, and the entire area of this little encampment below.
Its Transformation Formation shuddered as abruptly all of its fuel vanished, and left it with nothing to do. I imagined that the Cultivators monitoring it just sort of gawked.
Since it wasn’t being fed by the Formation, the protective Dome naturally had to get the energy it needed from somewhere else. It had not been pushing the Qi out while it was feeding the Dome, as there was no excess, but now it was doing the exact opposite, and I could feel the power moving in from outside, a wind of that stinking Fire Qi getting drawn into the vortex as the demands of the Dome reached out into the area and sucked all the Qi there into this area to fuel it.
There was nothing they could do about the Blighted, Cursed land they were now sitting on. The only way to get rid of the Blight was to Hallow the area, Blessing it and returning it to Nature, and Cultivators simply could not do that. They preyed on the power of the Land, they didn’t revere it or work with it.
Option #2. Energized Cold Diamonds and Sapphires in my hands for the goldweight equivs, I very happily put a Widened II Wall of Icefire around the Dome, at full Caster Level. It only took two spells to circle their entire Dome... and I anchored it to the Dome, not the ground, so if it shrank, it would bring the spell with it.
Twenty goldweight of Energized gemstones per spell. Throwing money at them, indeed. But judging by the six corpses we’d recovered, we’d make it back and a lot more from their Gear, so what did it matter? Six million dollars going once, twice, sold!
The raging Wall of Fire re-Aligned to Cold was cast at 40, as I Infused Clavus to add Sanctified Spell to it and the helpful Druidic Theurgy stacked on top. With the vivus, it was raging and tearing at the Dome of fire, doing continuous damage to it.
Forty feet high, each 5’ section taking 2-16+56 +4d6 damage or so... which was completely enough to chew through its Wall of Force, start devouring its structure, and demand more and more energy to repair the holes rapidly being eaten in its flames.
Since they couldn’t do anything about it, I also took the time to cast a Ritual Form Stillflight Field above them, which would last until my Renewal. So, no flying away. If they wanted to escape, they’d have to do it on foot... which meant going through that hungry Wall.
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The reversed flow of that thaumaturgically odoriferous Qi was being drawn past us back into the crater, swirling around that Dome in visible lines of burning energy, being drawn in and consumed to rebuild the Dome’s defenses.
Yeah, they could have lasted forever with a straight draw off the ley line. But the supremely hostile massive AoE beating at it, combined with the power draw fueling the entire massive thing, was consuming its power at a rather alarming rate, far, FAR faster than it had been spreading it into its surroundings.
Above and beyond that, the Qi had naturally been dissipating in the hostile manasphere, and absorbed by the Spirit Creatures they’d brought in, too.
All of which meant the massive area of Qi they’d brought into existence in the Firezone was now collapsing very quickly, indeed.
The biggest vector of collapse was naturally along our backtrail, where we’d vivisized everything we’d slain and basically built little islands of disruption into the coverage area of the Qi. Now the Qi was peeling away from those zones, cracks extending from one area to the next, and its pervasiveness was breaking apart rapidly.